Well, it’s taken me long enough, but I’ve finally finished the “two eyes” feature. It’s a big one, and one that I think really changes the gameplay. The only other change is that it now takes MUCH longer to go up a level. The next level is now reached when your total captures and total “living” stone captures equal LEVEL x LEVEL x 10. So to get to the second level, you only need ten captures, but for the second you need 40, and third you need 90. This means the game will get harder only very slowly, especially for new players.

I also added a check for those pesky “floating” stones that were basically hanging in mid-air all by themselves. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to check for groups of hanging stones, so those could still occur in the right circumstances.

I do think the new gameplay is very forgiving, and should make for a less stressful experience overall. More time for strategy and thinking!

A forthcoming post will explain how to make captures with two-eye groups.

New version tonight just fixes a bug introduced in the last version when you pause the game while the pieces are “exed” out. General wonkiness would ensue. Sorry about that, it’s fixed now. Thanks go to Dave for pointing yet another bug out! (This one before I noticed it!)

Bonus link of the day while I’m at it: I’ve been totally addicted to this game called “Ununicum“, a flash game by some guy who calls himself TONYPA. All of his games are worth checking out, but this latest one is especially addicting to me. I really like how there is no time constraint, it’s all strategy (and a bit of luck, I suppose), but anyway, there’s no feeling of hurry that is often paramount to puzzle games in general.

New version tonight! I haven’t had a lot of time to work on the game this week, but this new version does have some good stuff in it. One you’ll notice right away, and a couple of others you might not:

• Stones are now marked with a red “x” before they are removed from the board. This slows the game down minutely, and also gives you visual feedback on why the pieces are breaking.
• New key mappings! Now you can play with jkl & i… I added the details to the instructions page.
• Finally, when you break any stones now, if a part of the piece you just dropped is still “hanging” in the air, it’ll fall and rest on the next lowest resting point. This is ONLY if you break some stones with that piece. This is a very subtle change, but I think it will improve gameplay. (And fixes the dubious “bug” where you could leave a stone hanging in the air with no other stones touching it if it was played in a position to capture some pieces directly beneath one of the columns but not all of them.)

I still have tons to do, but I’d love feedback on these new features. Especially if you have any opinions about the timing of the new red “x”es marking captures. Do they stay too long? Too short? Does it seem okay?

I’m still working on the new “capture by making two eyes” feature, but I’ve commented out that code and pushed out a new release because there have been many improvements, and I don’t want to bother making bug fixes in two different versions of the code.

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